We should celebrate with fish and shippps … and Guinness!" says Mexican dog-trainer Cesar Millan, standing on Wimbledon Common, savouring another canine obedience triumph. Cesar, AKA The Dog Whisperer (Tue, 8pm, Nat Geo Wild), has exported his zen calm, his fluorescent teeth, and his pocket full of scooby snacks to UK soil. For Herbie, a wiry-haired mongrel, it's a time of mixed emotions. Herbie was perfectly content pre-Cesar: lolloping about covered in snarl-drool, rounding terrified pre-schoolers up into neat piles and offering police horses out for fights. Herbie laughed in the face of the magistrates court and its doggy destroy warrants. Then along came bossy Cesar, spouting mumbo-jumbo to Herbie's owner Sally about "reaffirming herself as pack leader", and in 60 TV minutes all-new huggable Herbie could feasibly audition for a three-ply loo-roll advert.

Obviously liking The Dog Whisperer, which I do, depends on liking dogs, which I do also. I like Herbie more than I like people I have to work with. Fools like me would be made perfectly emotionally replete with a channel called simply "K-9", featuring looped footage of a proud, ratty terrier festooned in mud and decayed rabbit corpses trying to carry home a big branch. I'd watch this for upwards of four hours. Or "Soppy chocolate labrador frolicking in babbling brook weekend". Or entire evenings playing live-cam footage of a german shepherd snoring in front of the fire with its four paws in the air. "Awww, look at his lovely paws," I'd chunter, while horizontal on a sofa in a cardigan covered in pet hair.

I'm not sure I particularly buy the quick-fix methods of TV trainers like Cesar Millan or Victoria Stilwell, in the same way I don't believe Supernanny Jo Frost reverses 10 years of child behaviour by clomping about in a pencil skirt dispensing gold stars, but there's always something soothing about watching other dog owners. I love cats more than dogs, but the reason I love cats is because a cat would never deign to appear on an idiotic digital channel obedience programme. "Piss off," a cat would seem to say, vanishing itself to the top shelf of the airing cupboard to sit, ears flattened, glaring furiously, from the very moment Jocasta the assistant producer from Eye-Fodder Production appeared. There will never be a Cat Whisperer or It's Me Or The Cat. The cat doesn't give a crap if you've come from LA and trained Will Smith's cats and have a pocket full of Kibbles: it will keep on dragging maggoty voles under your bed and sitting staring at you through a window mouthing "mow? mow?" for hours at a time, despite you spending £300 fitting a cat flap into the double glazing, just through sheer gleeful bloody mindedness. Cats are bastards. Cats don't want reality TV work. Cats drink from the toilet and still have more personal integrity than every single contestant on E4's Tool Academy.

"A dog wants a job," says Cesar about Herbie. When Sally's husband Dan was at home dying of cancer, Herbie climbed on to Dan's bed and lay on him like a big, sad rug, willing him to be well again. I love dogs for this. Dogs are brilliant. I'm not suggesting a cat wouldn't visit your bed in your darkest hour, but it would be mainly to leech warmth and to work out the exact moment when it needs to move next door without a backwards glance to people it likes better. A harder job for Cesar would be making idiots like me face this uncomfortable truth.